Recently in overview Category

The seventies counterculture generation embraced voluntary
simplicity and its low levels of resource use because it enabled not
only a lighter ecological footprint but also the chance to escape the
stifling straitjacket of bourgeois institutions. Decades later the
whole world faces a future of involuntary simplicity,
or décroissance (degrowth), as its advocates call it in
Europe. Invevitable degrowth? Really? How did that happen?

Introduction: Premises

Markets are the outward manifestation of the energy that
motivates them. Especially during the past two centuries, the quest
for greater and greater amounts of energy has driven the development
of populations and their economies all over the world. Three
important effects of this dynamic include environments degraded in an
effort to access cheaply and quickly the sources of energy; the
growth of populations out of proportion to the land’s ability to
sustain them; and a focus on increased profits, regardless of the
associated environmental, social, and spiritual costs.

An accounting of progress reveals that the effort to increase
material wealth necessitates concomitant technologies of increasing
complexity. In general, the more complex the solutions, the more
energy they consume. Our global economy is one example of a complex
solution. In an effort to keep up with the desire to realize
increased material wealth from products, we have created complicated
supply chains that span the globe; complicated enterprises to provide
access to raw materials and the methods of transportation needed to
support the supply chains; and many complicated interdependencies
among people, information, and supplies to achieve the goals. The
infrastructure required to ensure systems of production, whether
manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, education—you name
it—have become sufficiently complex as to defy easy review. The
manufacture of products requiring more energy to build also creates
more waste and pollution, both of which require resources, and
therefore more energy, to ameliorate.[1]

History tells us that societies have generally moved toward
increasing levels of complexity, doing so at their peril. In the
past, the emphasis on material progress has collided with limits on
raw materials, resulting in social instability and even societal
collapse. Complicated, expensive, and wasteful as material production
has become, many of us wonder whether our only choice is to continue
in this direction until we can go no further.[2]

As Joseph Tainter has explained, building more complexity with
more technology and energy yields diminishing returns to point C2,
beyond which it starts destroying quality of life.[3]

Most readers can imagine the 1800s, prior to the pervasive use
of fossil fuels. If we were to assess the availability of energy from
the vantage point of the Western world in the 1880s, what would we
find? Could we re-organize our social frame of reference in ways to
improve our chances of living within the limits of our natural
resources? How much of the knowledge acquired since the 1800s would
help to improve quality of life over what we were able to achieve
prior to the beginning of that period?

In recognizing that access to knowledge may not mean, at the
same time, access to today’s technologies developed from that
knowledge, we can begin to come to terms with the energy costs of
every technology, every act of production. We can ask ourselves
whether the exertion is worth the price, and we can make this
assessment from informed and sensitive perspectives. Worth noting is
that like energy itself, every technology has life-cycle energy
costs. When we evaluate the energy required to create a product, also
known as a product’s embedded energy, we make better decisions about
whether we can afford the product in question.

One of the benefits of assessing the potential for future
energy consumption today is that we are able to use the tools
presently available to us. Such tools include the internet and
associated information technologies; products that capture energy,
such as wind and solar technologies; and technologies related to
advances in medicine, the production and distribution of food, and
the use of materials ranging from metals to silken mesh, just to name
a few. In these and other similar examples, our use of relevant
technologies has capitalized on fossil fuels. We can use the
investment in knowledge as we learn to live with less
energy. According to environmental scholars Odum and Odum,
“Precedents from ecological systems suggest that the global society
can turn down and descend prosperously, reducing assets, population,
and unessential baggage while staying in balance with its
environmental life support system. By retaining the information that
is most important, a leaner society can reorganize itself and
continue making progress.”[4]

Material Benefits of Energy Descent

Before the broad availability of fossil fuels, the ecological
burden that human populations imposed on the environment, as measured
in depletion of raw materials and rates of damage to ecosystems, was
much lower than it is today. Although the environmental movement has
tried to influence the use and protection of resources, diminishing
access to cheap energy will offer solutions to many problems that we
experience today, including overshoot, or over-population, and
breaches of carrying capacity, otherwise defined as the inability of
resources to sustain populations without degrading the
environment. Simply by shrinking the industrial economy, which slows
the rate of damage, we can expect the following effects on some main
problem areas:

Slower depletion of non-renewable resources and slower
depletion of things that are either slowly renewable or
renewable at a high cost. Recycling will become a necessity, a
“growth industry.”

Less chemical pollution of soil, air, and water,
including greenhouse gas production.

Serious reductions in the human invasion of the
ecological niches of other species, as well as reductions in
the resulting mass extinction of species. When we cease to use
resources at the increasingly higher levels of the last 200
years, and the earth returns to a carrying capacity that
ecosystems had developed in the preceding millions of years of
natural history, we can expect greater environmental and
ecological balance.

Diminishing capacity for modern warfare, with its
impersonal, long-distance carnage,[5] and diminishing capacity
for the long-distance institutional violence of modern economic
empires. For example, many have argued that the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq have been resource wars, undertaken in
response to U.S. concerns about dwindling access to liquid
fuels. Whatever the cause, the results have been devastating
for all social groups involved, in part because of the
high-tech capabilities on every side of the
disagreement.

Social Benefits of Energy Descent

Arguably the most important benefits of lower energy use (which
means functioning at a lower level of complexity) are its social
implications for increased security, better social relations,
economic restructuring, political decentralization, and healthier
lifestyles.

Security

For most of us, the wealth and income that we achieve in our
present economy offer little real security, because receiving them
fails to confer direct power over them or their sources. As the
dominant organization of economic life becomes more brittle and
unreliable, its ability to provide economic security will decline,
and a subsistence perspective will become more attractive to
individuals and communities, because it will offer economic security
through more resilient structures. Rather than a return to a
particular historic model of a subsistence economy, a subsistence
perspective may in fact offer something deeper: a view that seeks to
regain the economic security and other benefits—mutualism,
reciprocity, and production for use-value rather than market
value—that characterized historic subsistence economies.[6]

Besides offering economic security, a subsistence perspective
is a view of empowerment that gives priority to the ability to
produce or obtain the necessities of life through control over the
necessary resource base (land, plant, and animal seed stock and their
genetic heritage, income from household work, etc.).[7] Hence, a
subsistence perspective has the potential to empower people who can
see, hold, and refer to the means of their production. For example,
economic relocalization can increase economic security by achieving
food sovereignty. On the other hand, in the present global economy,
growing mangoes empowers few in Nicaragua if the control over the
mango plantations and markets lies in the hands of transnational
corporations in New York. In fact, Nicaragua suffers distinct
disadvantages: the industrial agricultural practices of
Transnational Corporations, also referred to as TNCs, destroy soil
fertility and pollute the environment, the mangoes do not enter the
local food economy because they bring a better price in New York, and
the mango plantations displace local food production, weakening food
security for Nicaraguans. This example describes a global pattern in
the present system. Similarly, the advantage to local communities of
producing milk in the favorable conditions of New York State’s dairy
country is largely lost because corporate monopolies control milk
markets, and much of the milk is shipped elsewhere.

When it becomes clear that long-term inflation or its
equivalent has been baked into the U.S. financial cake, and that time
spent making money that only shrinks in value is a veritable
treadmill experience, people will discover the relative advantages of
time spent producing the essentially inflation-free goods of
subsistence, goods such as food, shelter, and clothing. Such items
must be produced and maintained, but they have a salutary affect on
one’s well-being and sense of achievement.

Social Relations

Societies will need to replace technological solutions with
ones based more on human relations, which will in turn stimulate the
rebuilding of the local community, including the revival of the
collectively managed commons.[8] We can see an example of the good
that accrues with this approach in the social and commercial
successes of the Ithaca Farmers’ Market, as well as in similar
enterprises in villages across Tompkins County.

As economies return to more local production, gender relations
may improve. Compared to modern society, peasant societies
demonstrate more balanced gender relations, since women are often in
control of markets despite distinct gender roles in the division of
labor.[9]

In human-scale economies, communities are more aware that
economic health increases with equality and its broadened purchasing
power. In some peasant communities, merchants vary prices according
to a buyer’s ability to pay. For example, even in Bavarian villages
of several decades ago, villagers could recall a time when general
stores practiced a sliding price scale as well as indefinite credit
accounts that acted as a kind of debt jubilee. These customs have
been contrasted with the practice of maximizing profits, a practice
that has come to dominate modern capitalist economies.[10]

The increasing strength of the informal economy at a human
scale, including to some degree the gift economy,[11] carries its
own potential benefits to the social health of the community. An
example of the potential, at least, of the latter, might be time
banking, which has been under consideration at intervals in Tompkins
County. Time banking is just one way to jump-start a gift economy,
and it has the advantage of avoiding a currency, along with the
capacity to advance interest-free credit.

Economy

Much that is harmful in the present economy will become too
costly to prolong, at least at present levels—the constant
advertizing blitzkrieg; the “happy motoring” transportation economy
with its traffic, road rage, commuting, and massive inefficiencies;
the long-distance, “colonial” economy that enables centers of wealth
and power based on exploitation of hinterlands.[12] In the U.S., we
have cannibalized much of our environment, and we have now
experienced more than half a century of developing strong interests
in the lands of others. As the past ten years have demonstrated, the
colonialization of distant places creates many problems, no matter
the benefits. Simply put, the enterprise is costly.

As happened in the collapse of the Soviet system,[13] an informal
food economy (theoretically illegal in the former USSR) can put a
floor under economic collapse. In much of the world it already does;
three quarters of the world’s economic activity operates as an
informal labor economy.[14] The informal economy expanded rapidly in
the U.S. during the Great Depression,[15] as was the case when
farmers worked on others’ farms, in exchange for similar labor
on their own farms.

Polity

As the cost of governing at state and national levels becomes
unaffordable, the capacity for social control at those levels may
weaken, creating a power vacuum and opening political space for more
decentralized power structures, which in turn may allow people more
participation in the decisions that affect their lives. In Tompkins
County, our local system of government is such that residents
frequently have the opportunity to participate on committees and
boards during short- or long-term proceedings. The local approach to
the recent development of Agricultural Plans in several Tompkins
County towns is one such example.[16]

As in all periods of instability, the coming one presents an
opportunity to break with a long historical period characterized by
hierarchical structures of dominance and experiment with more
horizontal structures of decision making.[17] European colonization
of the New World offered such a break, occasioning much social
experimentation.

Culture and Lifestyles

The more labor-intensive form of agriculture that industrial
societies will be forced to adopt as available energy declines will
put people into a healthier relation to the rest of nature, giving
them a physically and mentally healthier lifestyle, geared to natural
rhythms rather than the hyperactive patterns typical of urban
life. We can also expect that increased exercise associated with less
reliance on present modes of mechanical transportation and the
ubiquitous use of labor- and energy-saving devices ranging from snow
blowers to elevators will lead to improved health outcomes.

The increasing costs of discretionary consumption may force
society toward more satisfying behaviors. Cross-cultural studies
provide evidence of an inverse relationship between happiness and
material prosperity.[18] As the market price of frenzied consumerism
rises, so that the manufacture of desire via ads that pander to
commercial wants is no longer enough to maintain the addiction, other
values will have a chance to surface and eventually prevail. When the
energy available can no longer support today’s commercialized
spectator culture, people will return to more satisfying, participant
forms of cultural activity. We can imagine relational activities, in
which people share work and meals and stories in a community of
effort toward shared goals.

Local diversity of all sorts—physical, biological, economic,
cultural, etc.—will return to replace the uniformity imposed by
global capitalism once localities again become free to display their
distinctive characteristics. Such diversity represents the natural
adaptations to local physical realities and is healthier than the
tendency of the current system to fit everything on the planet into
the same marketable industrial mold.

In Summary: Localization and Salvage

Benefits of the energy descent are not instantaneous; they
appear gradually as we learn to use the opportunities of
localization. A view from the Transition Movement may be apt:

All the research I’ve seen, all the thinking I’ve
done, and all the people I’ve talked to suggests to me that
localisation will do a better job of meeting people’s
needs—people will be happier and will live in a more socially
cohesive way and more sustainably.… They’ll find that
their community is providing them with more opportunities to enact
those needs and those intrinsic values. They’ll find that
they’re experiencing fewer barriers to enacting the intrinsic
values and satisfying their needs.[19]

If John Michael Greer, long-time energy observer and commentator,
is right about his eco-successional theory of collapse,[20] breathing
room will be available during the transition. As he sees it, in a
first era of “scarcity industrialism,” as the limits to
growth kick in, the industrial system will work, but less and less
reliably, and will provide both time and incentives to evolve
adaptive habits and structures of cooperation, localization,
self-reliance, and voluntary simplicity. Greer argues that the
accumulated wealth and power of a century of superpower status will
give the U.S. adequate clout to provide temporary fixes while things
fall apart. Even in the subsequent age Greer envisions of
“salvage societies,” the immense accumulated built
environment of the age of abundance in which the heavily
industrialized nations have been living will serve as a store of
useful raw materials, a bonanza unknown to earlier low-energy
civilizations.

Some time in the next 30 years, life will start to become very different from what it is now. By mid-century we will use much less energy; we will live every aspect of our life much closer to home; and we will be much poorer in material terms, because energy and wealth are basically the same thing in an industrial society.

Energy descent — a radical reduction in our use of energy — is certain, but it’s not clear yet which of several factors will cause it to begin. Perhaps we will decide to do the right thing about climate change and reduce our CO2 emissions 80 or 90 percent, which would require changes almost that large in our actual consumption of energy. And there are other ways we might experience a radical reduction in our use of energy; for example, economic collapse, or an expanded war in the middle east. But the factor that makes energy descent a sure thing and sets the theme for this century is "peak oil" — the leveling off of global oil production and then its eventual and inexorable decline.

The timing of the peak is debatable, with forecasts ranging from 2005 (that is, already here) to 2030. But most credible estimates agree with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which concluded in a recent study that "world oil production is at or near its peak," and with the director of research at OPEC, who said recently that "we are at, or near, the production peak of world oil, if not on the downward slope."

After the peak, the growing gap between falling world oil production and ever-increasing global demand will send prices skyward, with economic results that can only be imagined but will certainly include greatly restricted mobility due to the high cost of fuel and much higher prices for most goods, including food. The result will be less disposable income, a life lived closer to home, and a greater reliance on the goods and services that can be provided locally. Since the supply of oil and other fossil fuels is finite, this outcome is guaranteed. The only question is, Shall we plan for what we can see coming, or just let it happen to us?

A group of area citizens, TCLocal, has begun planning now. TCLocal contributors are committed to researching various aspects of energy descent in Tompkins County and writing up a preliminary plan for each aspect based on purely local challenges and resources. This is one such plan.